This paper describes a set of tools developed at our laboratory that provide a reliable setup for conducting bio-inspired experiments with real robots. We focus on the hardware tools needed to monitor team performances as well as those to achieve collective adaptive behaviours. We propose concrete solutions to some of the main problems in collective robotics. The four main results we derive are...

In this paper, we aim to design decision-making mechanisms for a simulated Khepera robot equipped with simple sensors, which integrates over time its perceptual experience in order to initiate a simple signalling response. Contrary to other previous similar studies, in this work the decision-making is uniquely controlled by the time-dependent structures of the agent controller, which in turn ar...

Survival in the animal realm often depends on the ability to elucidate the potentialities for action offered by every situation. This paper argues that affordance learning is a powerful ability for adaptive, embodied, situated agents, and presents a motivation-driven method for their learning. The method proposed considers the agent and its environment as a single unit, thus intrinsically relat...

Biology has produced living creatures that exhibit remarkable fault tolerance. The immune system is one feature that enables this. The acquired immune system learns during the life of the individual to differentiate between self (that which is normally present) and non-self (that which is not normally present). This paper describes a artificial immune system (AIS) that is used as an error detec...

This paper presents a completely autonomous system which is able to find, detect and recognize objects by different patterns. A low-cost artificial vision system was implemented using only a webcam and a complex image processing algorithm, SIFT. This vision system can be embedded in any autonomous robot, but for experiments and demonstration it was tested on the Khepera III autonomous robot pla...

In previous research we have demonstrated a computational model of the intrinsic circuitry of the vertebrate basal ganglia based on the proposal that these central brain structures play an important role in action selection. The current work embeds this model within the control architecture of a Khepera mobile robot allowing action selection between multiple behaviors styled on some of the home...

The problem of the validity of simulation is particularly relevant for methodologies that use machine learning techniques to develop control systems for autonomous robots, as, for instance, the artificial life approach known as evolutionary robotics. In fact, although it has been demonstrated that training or evolving robots in real environments is possible, the number of trials needed to test ...

Henrik Hautop Lund John Hallam Wei-Po Lee Department of Artificial Intelligence University of Edinburgh, 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh EH1 2QL, Scotland, UK [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/staff/Henrik Lund.html Abstract—True evolvable hardware should evolve whole hardware structures. In robotics, it is not enough only to evolve the control circuit...

Robot football is a challenging task in the world of autonomous robots and related research areas. One of the main problems in this task is to determine the presence and the location of objects from the robot’s point of view. This paper introduces methods to recognize the objects in a football field, by the aid of vision. The methods are tested on a simulator [1] of a Khepera [2] autonomous mob...

Tangible agent (TA) is a new medium that communicates the senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste of human to computer. Intelligent behavior is a key property to realize the agent because it must interact with human to grasp all the information. We have adopted behavior-based approach for high-level hehaviors such as navigation of office, conversation with human, and cleaning of room....